What are some ways people have successfully done this? For the sake of discussion, let's assume that my strategy has IP worth protecting and isn't just trading randomness.
From a practical point, the best you can hope for is the developer will honor the terms of a confidentiality agreement.
I'm thinking that maybe to give the developer an incentive to honor it, I would give them a piece of any profits from an account I set up to trade it without human intervention, or, if there are no profits after an agreed-upon period of time, a fixed fee commensurate with their market rate. That would make them a co-owner and they wouldn't want the strategy to proliferate as a result.
"That would make them a co-owner" hiring a service and taking on a partner are very different things.
Are you running off of a class c or class b ip? If it's a b get a switch and chunk off some class c vlans and have it setup from within these virtual networks. this way your 10 dot is hidden and once your system is set up under the vlan and your developer is gone, you're free to reset those ips
The sad truth is, there is no way to prevent the strategy from moving out of the inner circle and also no way for you get any relief from the courts if it does. I suggest you go to a developer, like Futures Truth, who has a lot to lose in terms of reputation if he breaches. They will also test you're system to find how much worse it is than you will want to believe.
It's a fair point. My idea is that they are an "arms-length" partner, certainly at first. If the potential payoff after a pre-determined time is a multiple of what their market-based fee would be (and they will get the market-based fee in the worst case anyway), they are incentivized to just keep to the confidentiality agreement, because everyone understands that the more people who use a strategy, the less profitable it is. In that scenario, there's really almost no downside for them, unless they could find someone with an interest in buying it out for more than the potential upside, which seems more than a little doubtful.
With the tools that are available today for system developers that are not programmers make me wonder why you would want a third party developer.
It's not that I want one, I'm just operating under the assumption that having one is a necessary evil. I did some Java development back about 10 years ago but getting back up to speed on that is something I'd prefer not to do. That said, if you think there is a tool I should look at, please post a name or a link and I will.